Open Collections

Leyton, Carolina

University of British Columbia

This excerpt from a young adult novel, Wish You Were Gone, deals with topics of grief and memory as they intertwine with immigrant experiences and movements towards the global north. The story follows eighteen-year-old, Colombian-American, Maria Molina Herrera, after the passing of her maternal grandmother, Abuelita Lucero. Not to worry, though, because María doesn’t have to grieve. She’ll see her Abuelita again. Not in an, “I’ll see you in my dreams” or supernatural signs kind of way. María’s family can tether the souls of the departed to the living world, essentially bonding her blood and family marriage for eternity. So, everything is great because Abuelita Lucero will return and life can go on as normal. Except not really. María’s connection to her grandmother has been severed by none other than Abuelita herself. For María to be able to talk to her grandmother’s soul, Abuelita had to leave an item in her will for María to use as a conduit. Out of petty resentment over an argument, Abuelita Lucero didn’t leave anything for María’s parents, little brother, or María herself. Confused and hurt by her grandmother’s decision, María decides to take matters into her own hands, not only wanting to fully understand Abuelita’s reasons for doing this, but ultimately fix the rift post-mortem. She enlists the help of both dead and living relatives to undertake the bureaucratic process of inserting her family into Abuelita’s will (yes, even the dead can’t escape legalities) and, in the process, discovers out family secrets that might have been better left alone and now threaten to irreversibly break her family.

Text

2024-07-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88596

Children's Literature

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/